Social Media

It’s the Golden Age of Celebrity Snapchat

Within the past year or so, Snapchat has—for a large swath of the population, especially those under the age of 30—become the go-to social network, the one you check first during a commercial break of a television show, the first you think to open when you see something amusing on the sidewalk in the East Village. The main appeal—and excuse us for the Wikipedia-ish feel of this sentence—is that everything that is posted on Snapchat . . . disappears (for those unfamiliar, any content—a photo or video—posted to one’s Snapchat story, viewable to all of one’s followers, disappears after 24 hours). Another appeal: there are no “likes” or follower counts or (public) metrics of any kind. Unlike Instagram or Twitter, there is no way to tangibly measure how popular another user is: you are the same as your college roommate who is the same as Ariana Grande (more on this point, shortly).

As much as the ephemeral nature of snaps and the status-free world within the app might appeal to us “commoners,” one could easily imagine these two features of the platform would, to the same degree, actively deter celebrities. Famous people love making bold, permanent statements (i.e., ones that don’t vanish the next day) and they love being reminded of their own popularity and fame, you’re probably thinking (what, your thought isn’t peppered with parentheticals and “i.e.” digressions?!). And, for a time, early on, celebrities were not a major component of the Snapchat experience. The famous are, of course, an integral part of the user experience on Instagram and Twitter (and, to a lesser extent, Facebook). Sixty-nine million people (theoretically) see every post Taylor Swift uploads to Instagram, which makes her account, in a way, the closest thing we have, culturally, to one of those hit shows from the 90s—like ER or Friends—where it was just assumed everyone was watching. Many gossip blogs these days are sustained almost completely by Instagram posts (“See Selena Gomez’s Sultry Poolside Selfie,” etc.); Kanye West’s Twitter feed has been at the center of the pop-cultural conversation for a good few months now.

Snapchat, though, for now at least, grants celebrities something that these other platforms do not: because blogs have not quite figured out how to properly wade through and cover Snapchat content, the famous users are . . . basically left alone! Since the snaps disappear, and can’t be linked out to, it isn’t really possible to embed them in blog posts. There are ways around this, of course, either via writers transcribing the “dialogue” or action from Snapchat stories, or embedding Instagram rips of story content (see the “captured” Kylie Jenner Snapchat video below), but there is no solution that isn’t a bit clumsy. When Lady Gaga posed with Jennifer Lawrence for a Snapchat picture at an Oscars luncheon last month, or when Calvin Harris and Taylor Swift snapped from a GQ Grammys after-party, those items were certainly picked up by a few blogs, but they did not receive the full-fledged coverage either would have were the initial posts on Twitter or Instagram. In this way, Snapchat, with its disappearing materials, affords celebrities something they don’t really have in other public forums: a sense that they can “be themselves,” without the usual magnifying glass held up inches away from their output. And, as a result of that (relative) freedom, they’re able to provide a connection that feels more real; something that, from the standpoint of the viewer at least, feels like a level of intimacy.

It took, though, two celebrities—both with very different personas—to break the “barrier,” as it were; the first two who seemed to figure out a way to make Snapchat “their own” (to use reality-singing-competition parlance) and raise their profiles at the same time. One, Kylie Jenner, was already very well known (Jenner has more than 53 million Instagram followers and . . . you may be familiar with her family), but her Snapchat account was what really cemented her High-Profile Personality status. Jenner’s Snapchat is comprised about 40 percent of video selfies taken as she drives around Los Angeles, mouthing the words to a rap or R&B song, about 40 percent of antics with her friends (primarily, these days, non-celebrities Jordyn Woods and Harry Hudson), and then 20 percent of footage related to her work (behind the scenes at fashion shoots, backstage at events, getting ready for a party with sister Kendall). The world of Kylie Jenner’s Snapchat is very different from the world of Kylie Jenner on Keeping Up with the Kardashians or even the world of Kylie Jenner’s Instagram: it feels like the most “real” of all the versions. Sure, even on her Snapchat, she is mostly seen in full makeup, and, sure, there always seems to be an awareness on her part, in one way or another, that she is Being Filmed, but there’s a relaxed and authentic quality to the proceedings that, for the most part, reminds the viewer that she is an 18-year-old, as much as she is a tabloid fixture or a mega-celebrity. While her Instagram features carefully cropped and filtered shots of her expensive bags and sneering pouts and designer crop tops, the life she presents on Snapchat is much more relatable: She’s listening to the new Rihanna album, just like I am! She makes fun of her friends’ clothing choices, just like I do! She cooks dinner, just like I . . . should be doing!

DJ Khaled, the 40-year-old D.J. and personality who has widely been heralded as the “king of Snapchat,” gained his fame on the platform through some good brand consistency, we’ll call it. Khaled devised the “keys to success,” which he signified with iconography (the key emoji owes him 75 percent of whatever it now is able to charge for appearances), and his mantra “They don’t want you to . . .” was quickly mimicked by Justin Bieber and Calvin Harris and scores of bros (and non-bros) alike, as the prominence of Khaled and his Snapchat ascended. In the same way that there are certain movie lines or memes that seemingly pop up everywhere around you, like an Internet rash, overnight, Khaled’s Snapchat became a pop-cultural nexus point, a topic for brunches and car rides and gchats. (And, like any good pop-cultural water source, there is now, some would argue, after time, a case of overflooding. A friend recently lamented to me that he had to unfollow Khaled: “It’s just . . . getting to be a lot, you know?”)

In both of these cases, Kylie and Khaled (it’s actually pretty wild these two haven’t yet collaborated and popped up in each other’s snaps yet) benefited by being celebrity pioneers on Snapchat (both of their “shticks” felt like something we hadn’t exactly seen before) and also in the way they were each able to reveal new aspects of their personas to the general population. Whereas Instagram posts from celebrities feel like press releases, to a certain extent, Snapchat stories are much-less filtered or curated. Even if this isn’t the case, it feels like Kylie is a friend of ours, like we’ll be seeing her later in the day and getting an update on how things are going with Tyga and maybe watching a movie on Apple TV together (likely a trashy horror movie) while eating weird sour candy. Often, I have a better sense of how she spent her week than I do how my best friends in New York did.

In their wake, other celebrities have now begun to find their way onto Snapchat, as well, and figured out how to make themselves most comfortable. Kate Hudson used a large chunk of her time on Ellen recently to talk about her Snapchat obsession; Hudson lets us into her breakfast prep and workout routines and airplane rides and press junkets (often using a tool in the app to speed up the proceedings, giving the whole enterprise an over-caffeinated quality that seems very on-brand for her). Calvin Harris mainly offers up studio-session peeks and real-time streaming of his cycling workouts. Lady Gaga joined the platform before her Super Bowl performance, and has used it as sort of an on-the-road documentary tool, sharing moments from before and after performances, and from rehearsal rooms and impromptu sing-alongs. The snap story of Rihanna on a wine tasting with her friends is almost definitely one of 2015’s top pop-cultural texts.

We probably shouldn’t expect this golden age to last long, though. In fact, today’s arrival of one of our brightest celebrities of all, Kim Kardashian, on Snapchat, is perhaps a sign that the end of this period of semi-tranquility for celebrities on this continent is nigh, as Us Weekly and the rest of ’em will have no choice but to pull up their sleeves and somehow get into the Snapchat aggregation mud. Now that Kim’s made her way over, more and more celebrities will arrive on the app; the blogs will figure out how to post Snapchat content more readily; celebrities will stop posting so freely; and, hey, maybe a new social-network oasis will emerge somewhere else. But that’s how it goes; just when you’re finally feeling comfortable in the new hangout spot, just when you think you’ve got a handle on how it all works and can take a deep breath, everyone who’s there, in what feels like an instant, disappears.